Speaking to the Daily News yesterday, Zanu-PF secretary for security in the politburo, Lovemore Matuke, also said remnants of the two once powerful party factions were behind the chaos that ravaged last weekend’s district co ordinating committee (DCC) elections.
At the same time, liberation war icon and one of the remaining Zanu-PF founders, Rugare Gumbo, has implored both Mnangagwa and the ruling party to disband the DCCs – which he has warned will inflame growing factional and tribal wars.
All this comes as Zanu-PF has yet to announce the results of the majority of the DCC elections, following complaints of massive rigging and cheating by some of the losing candidates.
Matuke told the Daily News yesterday that the chaos that characterised the DCC elections had been engineered by remnants of the G40 and Gamatox factions, as they allegedly continued to attempt to weave their way back into Zanu-PF.
In the last few years in power of the late former president Robert Mugabe, G40 kingpins coalesced around the nonagenarian’s erratic wife Grace — resulting in the group engaging in a hammer and tongs tussle with Mnangagwa’s Team Lacoste over Zanu-PF’s then unresolved succession question.
Gamatox was a name for the faction that was rallying behind former vice president Joice Mujuru’s bid to succeed Mugabe, before she was brutally purged from both the government and the former liberation movement in the run-up to Zanu-PF’s sham congress in December 2014.
“They (alleged G40 and Gamatox remnants) want to come back to Zanu-PF because it’s cold out there. People struggle to survive outside Zanu-PF,” Matuke said yesterday, before referring the Daily News for further comment to the party’s secretary for the commissariat, Victor Matemadanda.
However, Matemadanda would not shed more light on the matter — saying he was seized with the problematic DCCs.
“If someone was G40, it doesn’t mean that he is not going to come back to the party … for now, I am busy with DCC elections and can’t comment further,” he said.
Other Zanu-PF insiders who spoke to the Daily News yesterday said ruling party bigwigs were worried about the resurgence of the two factions — especially in Mashonaland Central, Masvingo, Manicaland and Mashonaland East provinces.
These insiders also claimed that the G40 and Gamatox factions believed that they could resurrect themselves and bounce back into Zanu-PF — allowing them to rekindle their yester-year fights with Mnangagwa from within.
“The party is currently seized with this matter because the two factions are working together closely. Those who are already in the party structures are working to bring back their allies via the DCCs.
“They are trying to occupy influential positions … day and night they are fighting party leaders so that they can influence key decisions,” one of the insiders told the Daily News.
This comes as the demons of factionalism and tribalism that gutted Zanu-PF during the last few years in power of Mugabe have returned to the party with a vengeance. The brutal wars were temporarily ended in dramatic fashion by the military which rolled its tanks into Harare on November 15, 2017 — after deciding that they had had enough of Mugabe and Grace.
By then, the G40 had succeeded in having Mnangagwa sacked from both the government and Zanu-PF — just as they had done with Mujuru in 2014 when she, together with other bigwigs such as Didymus Mutasa and Gumbo, were jettisoned from the party over untested allegations that they wanted to oust and kill Mugabe.
Last weekend, Zanu-PF’s keenlycontested DCC elections were marred by chaos which has now forced the ruling party to postpone announcing the majority of the poll results. On Tuesday, Zanu-PF national chairperson Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri only announced the winners of the contests for the positions of chairperson, deputy chairperson and secretary for administration for some of the districts.
She said the other results had been withheld to allow the former liberation movement to conduct thorough investigations into allegations of electoral chicanery.
“We have received a number of complaints and one of the reasons why we have not released some results from some districts is the contestation which surrounds them.
“We want to investigate those complaints, hence we have not accommodated some of the results. “We still have at least two days to send out teams to thoroughly investigate where we feel there has been some unfairness and we also need to verify some figures which did not quite tally,” Muchinguri-Kashiri said.
Meanwhile, liberation stalwart Gumbo has warned that the DCCs are highly divisive and need to be parked for now to allow unity in Zanu-PF. “The issue of the DCCs has been a source of friction, factionalism and divisions in the party for a long time, and that explains why they were disbanded in the first place.
“While we don’t know how things will shape up, it is difficult to imagine the party maintaining its unity in their aftermath, given the history of the DCCs. “You may recall that they were abolished because of the disharmony that they had brought into the movement.
“We can only hope that if the new leadership sees value in them, they have a way to solve the subsequent conflict in a way that unites the party. “But from our knowledge of the party, they (the DCCs) are a real challenge and also unnecessary,” the forthright Gumbo told the Daily News yesterday.
The DCC structures elect Zanu-PF’s 10 provincial executives — from where the party draws members of the central committee and the politburo.
The party’s DCCs were disbanded in 2012 after they were deemed to be fanning factionalism during Mnangagwa and Mujuru’s battles to succeed Mugabe.
Then, Mnangagwa’s group had gained control of most regions, including Mujuru’s Mashonaland Central province putting him in a strong position ahead of the party’s 2014 congress.
